Chapter 25 The Night We Met
The Night We Met
Catherine
Catherine walked along the hallway to Mary's apartment, her hand trailing along the paneling she'd touched dozens of times.
Mary's door stood slightly ajar, waiting for her, warm light spilling into the hallway along with the rich scent of something braised with onions and herbs.
Catherine knocked twice before pushing the door open, already smiling—and froze.
Her expression rearranged itself quickly, but not quickly enough.
Theodora sat on Mary's floral sofa, a glass of wine balanced on her knee, her copper hair catching the lamplight.
She wore jeans and a baby blue sweater, her Converse kicked off by the door in a gesture so familiar that Catherine felt it somewhere behind her sternum.
Theodora's head turned at the sound of the door, her green eyes widening with the same shock Catherine felt flooding her system.
"Catherine!" Mary emerged from the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder, her expression a masterclass in manufactured surprise. "Oh, good, you're here. Come in, come in. Don't just stand there."
Catherine looked at Mary, and Mary, to her credit, looked back at her, entirely unbothered.
"Mary," Catherine said.
"I made pot roast," Mary said. "Sit down."
Catherine held her gaze for a second longer, as if weighing the likelihood of winning this particular battle. Then she sat.
Theodora caught her eye from the sofa with a small smile that said she'd arrived to find exactly the same setup and had also, apparently, decided that arguing with Mary Stevenson was not a battle worth having.
Catherine pressed her lips together. Theodora pressed hers together.
Something passed between them, not quite amusement, but adjacent to it.
"Wine?" Mary said, appearing with a glass.
"Please," Catherine and Theodora said at the same moment.
Mary smiled, looking very much like someone who had arranged exactly this outcome and was not remotely sorry about it. She pointed at the bottle on the bar and went back to the kitchen.
They both looked at the bottle. Then at each other.
Theodora laughed and said, "We've been played."
Catherine picked up the bottle with a small smile. “Thoroughly,” she said, passing it to Theodora. “You pour.”
Dinner was, as it always was at Mary's, better than it had any right to be. They ate at Mary's small table with its crocheted placemats and the candle that Mary lit for every meal, regardless of occasion.
The conversation found its footing slowly at first, the three of them navigating around things, and then somewhere between the second glass of wine and Mary's commentary on the new residents in 12C who had apparently been receiving suspiciously unmarked deliveries at all hours, it loosened.
Theodora told them about a client who had arrived at The Mission that week with a tortoise in a tote bag, matter-of-fact, as if this were not the opening of a story that required significant elaboration.
It required significant elaboration. Catherine found herself laughing at a table for the first time in longer than she wanted to tally, the kind of laugh that arrived without warning and didn't apologize for itself.
The laughter faded in increments. Mary topped up the wine and let the quiet settle before she spoke.
"How are your parents?" she asked Theodora.
Theodora's expression shifted, not dramatically, just a slight tightening around her eyes.
She turned her wine glass once in between her fingers.
"My mom called last week. It was maybe four minutes.
She asked how work was going, and I said fine, and she said good, and we ran out of things after that.
" She paused. "My dad still isn't talking to me. "
Mary’s face held sympathy and a barely restrained desire to set something on fire, all at once.
Catherine was quieter about it. She said nothing, just set her wine glass down and looked at Theodora in a way that made it clear she had formed a very firm opinion about Patrick Brennan and intended to keep it entirely to herself.
"It's fine," Theodora said. "I think I needed to stop performing for them before I could figure out what I actually wanted."
Catherine looked down at her plate. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
Mary let the moment settle, then stood and began collecting plates with the brisk efficiency of someone who had made up her mind.
"They'll come around," she said, moving between the table and the kitchen. "Or they won't. Either way, you won't have built your life around waiting for them." She set the plates down and reappeared in the doorway. "Catherine. Didn't you mention something about gala paperwork?"
Catherine looked at her. "I—yes. It's in my apartment."
"Well, go and get it." Mary was halfway to the kitchen. "Theodora can go with you."
"I can just bring it—"
"Nonsense. Dinner's over, and I've got my show starting in five minutes." Mary appeared in the doorway with both their coats already draped over her arm. “Go on, both of you."
Theodora stood, accepted her coat, and caught Catherine's eye again with the same look from earlier, the one that lived somewhere between helplessness and the recognition that Mary Stevenson was a force that moved through the world in one direction, and it was easier to go with her.
"Thank you for dinner, Mary," Theodora said.
"You're welcome, sweetheart." Mary hugged her with the fierce brevity that was her signature, then turned to Catherine and held her gaze for just a moment longer than necessary. Subtle, Mary was not. "You too."
Catherine stepped in to hug her. “You’re a menace,” she whispered against her ear.
Mary patted her cheek as she pulled back. “I know, baby. Goodnight.”
They walked the short distance to 14D side by side, close enough that their arms brushed in the narrow hallway. Catherine unlocked the door and pushed it open, reaching for the light.
The apartment rose up around them, the piano in the second room, the bookshelves, the lounge where she and Theodora had once sat while something between them tipped, wordlessly and irreversibly, in one direction.
She stepped aside to let Theodora in.
Theodora stayed in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her hands in her pockets, looking at Catherine with an expression that was almost innocent. "Well. Do I need a formal invitation inside, Miss Matthews?"
Catherine laughed, the sound catching her off guard.
She reached out and took Theodora by the arm and pulled her in.
They ended up toe to toe in the small hallway, closer than strictly necessary, both still laughing, and for a moment it was easy, just completely and entirely easy, and Catherine let herself stand in it. Like no time had passed at all.
Then the laughter settled, and they were still standing close. Neither of them moved. The apartment was quiet, and Theo's eyes were on hers.
It would be easy. That was the thing. It would be so easy to close the small distance between them, and she knew, with a certainty that was almost frightening, that Theodora would let her.
But easy wasn't the same as right, and she had learned, slowly and at some cost, the difference between the two.
Christ, Florence would be proud.
"I'll just…" Catherine took a step back, crossed to the desk by the window, and picked up the manila folder.
Theodora had followed her in and stood close at her shoulder, not looking at the folder at all but at the book beside it.
She lifted it gently, turning it over once in her hands. It was Catherine’s copy of Persuasion.
"You're still reading this?" she asked, her voice low and threaded with that familiar note of teasing.
"I've read it twelve times," Catherine said. "It doesn't require active reading anymore."
Theodora flipped it open, thumbing through the pages with absent curiosity.
“Wait—” Catherine reached for it, but she was a second too late.
A lime-green sticky note fluttered free, catching the lamplight as it drifted toward the carpet. Theodora caught it midair. Her eyes moved across the cramped handwriting.
Stop practicing at midnight or I'm calling the police
— 14C
Catherine exhaled through her nose, “That was the third one,” she said. “You stuck it with a thud that I assumed was you kicking my door.”
Theodora flipped to another page, and a pink note peeked from the crease. She slid it free, smirking.
Does Chopin know you're butchering him like this?
— 14C
"That one stung," Catherine said. "I practiced twice as long the next day just to spite you."
Theodora turned another page. Orange this time.
Do you accept bribes? How much for one silent night?
— 14C
Catherine's mouth curved. "You left that one with a dollar bill taped underneath. I returned it under your door with interest."
Theodora chuckled gently, "I used it to buy earplugs."
"That you then taped to my door with a note that said ‘False advertising — 14C’.” Catherine smiled at her. "I laughed so hard, I nearly framed it."
Catherine reached out and touched the edge of another note still clinging to a page.
"This was the first one you didn't sign.
" She read it quietly. "You hit a wrong note somewhere in the middle.
I couldn't tell you where, but my ears flinched, so you might want to work on that.
" She looked up. "That was the moment I realized you were actually listening. "
She turned the pages, and the notes revealed themselves between chapters, pressed flat against Austen's prose like dried flowers.
Lime green, hot pink, electric yellow, pale blue, from when they'd run out of the garish ones.
Dozens of them. Noise complaints and composer opinions and dinner plans and film recommendations and small, unremarkable observations about unremarkable days.
"Catherine." Theodora looked up from the book. "Why did you keep them all?"